Consumer preferences and behaviour have changed as a result of COVID experiences over the past 12 months. Working with leading developers it is interesting to see the type of questions we are being asked. A common question is what is the proportion of households that will have someone working (part time or full time) from home post COVID. While there is some information available in the United States – there is very scant information available in Australia. In the United States, the consensus is between 25% and 35% of households will have someone working from home post COVID. In Australia, the ABS collects information but it includes people that bring work home after hours so it overstates the impact of working from home. Urbanised has meshed a few data sets together from Sydney University and worked from a base year of 2016.

What we have found is that working from home was already increasing steadily from 2016 to 2019. COVID restrictions accelerated the trend with around 40% of households having one or two people working from home.

We spliced the University of Sydney data with the ABS questions on whether people would prefer to continue working from home post COVID. Based on this we estimate that 26% households could have someone working (part time or full time) from home after COVID.

This will have an impact on developments of the future. From the developers having to design for working from home and some even having shared office facilities as part of their new projects to planners coming to terms that residential housing will also be used for employment and lower demand for public transport, to Councils coming to terms a greater demand for local services and community retail.